Hi,
There is various ways to pick up a new language. However, unless you're a prodigy, language learning isn't a super quick process. It requires quite a bit of work, figuring out and making lots and lots of mistakes.
How you go about picking up a language depends very much on the language, how popular it is, what you aim to do with it, where your focuses lie.
Generally when I pick up a new language at first, I go about it in this order:
- What language family does the language belong to? E.G., romance, germanic, scandinavian etc.
- What do I know about that language family, and can I use that to supplement my learning? E.G. I know the Italian word, will that help me in Spanish?
Those are essentially my cheats. I have seen quite a few languages so I can ask myself these questions and get meaningful answers. If you can't, that's fine. You don't need it.
- Next, pronunciation guide. What sounds are in the language, how tricky are they to make and are there any troubling ones? If so, pronunciation will have to be a focus, because if there are for example distinct, but very similar sounds in a language, with differences I find hard to make or even hear, that means I might accidentally make it harderfor a native speaker to understand me without knowing it.
- How does braille in my chosen language work? Mandarin and Japanese have radically different braille systems that make it difficult to ascertain spelling based on braille, and if that is important to me I will need to learn the braille system.
- Next, screen reader tweaks. I need to somehow be able to read my chosen language. That usually means grabbing either the oneCore or Vocalizer voice for NVDA, setting my language pair in the InstantTranslate addon and making sure that I have a gesture set for translate selection. At this point, doing a bit of research on what the closest to native-sounding TTS voice is.
- Next, resource diving. We need to somehow cover all four of the main language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing.
This is by far where the majority of preparation time get eaten since depending on the language , this can be an absolute pain.
Some good starting points:
- See if there's a subreddit for the language you're learning. I've found many a good resource there.
- See if Babbel has your language. It's not free, but very affordable, and it gives you an good introduction to a language's basics in my opinion. It's pretty accessible and teaches you far more than Duolingo ever will.
- If Babbel doesn't have your language, check with Memrise and Elon.io . Memrise could be more accessible, but is usable after you get used to it, on Windows on the web that is. Elon.io is not very well known but has a pretty good free Japanese course and also allows you to create your own wordlists. They use a timed review system on those, but I'm not 100% sure it's one of the more popular SRS variants.
- If you absolutely must, Duolingo is an option but you will make very, very slow progress and often ask why things are the way they are without ever getting an answer.
- If you can at all get your hand on an accessible textbook of some kind, do so. They contain exercises, practice texts and grammar notes and usually have a good progression. The Colloquial Language books are somewhat pricy, but digital these days and they are a staple for many language learners.
- Podcasts, radio stations and audio stories are good for listening practice, although at first they will tire you out quickly if you listen to them actively. Having them in the background is good passive immersion, though. Movies and series with subtitles can help a lot too, use Podplayer to have the subtitles read to you.
- Simplified news, articles you find interesting or children's stories can be good reading practice. If your language has a subreddit, you'll most likely find your resources there. If not, see if Kindle has anything fun.
- Finally, applying your language knowledge is the best way to make the concepts stick. Find native speakers to practice on, talk to your devices in your chosen language if you can, play with phrases using InstantTranslate, the possibilities are many.
The rest depends on your language. If anyone needs help learning Dutch, English, Japanese, mandrin or Danish I can probably recommend some specific resources. If not ..well ...then not
Hope that helps anyone